The Midland County Board has approved the purchase of a 12-month contract with Verizon for Networkfleet GPS service for Midland County Mosquito Control.

The purchase price of $3,268 was unanimously approved last week.

“We will have the real time location for each of our vehicles,” County Mosquito Control Director Carl Doud said. “The system will provide us a pathway so we can track what we have done. This is particularly useful for our summer time fogging.

The system incorporates with each vehicle’s fog unit and tracks when the unit is turned on and off.

“Sometimes we will have a dispute with a resident, either we did fog where we shouldn’t. Or we didn’t fog where we should. We could look at some tangible data to verify and then we can adjust if we need to,” Doud said.

Doud mentioned that the new system would have four advantages over the old system, which has been in use for five years:

• “The data that we get from our current system doesn’t incorporate our GIS software. This Verizon system should. That would be a big help to incorporate all of our other treatment maps to have this fogging data and the movement of the vehicles to add to it.”

• Roadside assistance — “We do get trucks stuck a number of times, especially in the spring. Rather than take one of our four-wheel drives off its route, we would at least have the option of calling a wrecker service in for it.”

• Reminders for scheduled maintenance.

• Going paperless — “When we spray the ditches, right now our system is paper based and it is based on our best guess as to where we were applying and where we stopped based on the conditions of the ditch where the water was accumulated. Now we would have an automatic relay of that data just like we can with the fog units.”